BYANJON: A Ground Truth Preparation System for Online Handwritten Bangla Documents

The work reported in this article deals with the ground truth generation scheme for online handwritten Bangla documents at text-line, word, and stroke levels. The aim of the proposed scheme is twofold: firstly, to build a document level database so that future researchers can use the database to do research in this field. Secondly, the ground truth information will help other researchers to evaluate the performance of their algorithms developed for text-line extraction, word extraction, word segmentation, stroke recognition, and word recognition. The reported ground truth generation scheme starts with text-line extraction from the online handwritten Bangla documents, then words extraction from the text-lines, and finally segmentation of those words into basic strokes. After word segmentation, the basic strokes are assigned appropriate class labels by using modified distance-based feature extraction procedure and the MLP ( Multi-layer Perceptron ) classifier. The Unicode for the words are then generated from the sequence of stroke labels. XML files are used to store the stroke, word, and text-line levels ground truth information for the corresponding documents. The proposed system is semi-automatic and each step such as text-line extraction, word extraction, word segmentation, and stroke recognition has been implemented by using different algorithms. Thus, the proposed ground truth generation procedure minimizes huge manual intervention by reducing the number of mouse clicks required to extract text-lines, words from the document, and segment the words into basic strokes. The integrated stroke recognition module also helps to minimize the manual labor needed to assign appropriate stroke labels. The freely available and can be accessed at https://byanjon.herokuapp.com/ .

Combining Morphological and Histogram based Text Line Segmentation in the OCR Context

Text line segmentation is one of the pre-stages of modern optical character recognition systems. The algorithmic approach proposed by this paper has been designed for this exact purpose. Its main characteristic is the combination of two different techniques, morphological image operations and horizontal histogram projections. The method was developed to be applied on a historic data collection that commonly features quality issues, such as degraded paper, blurred text, or presence of noise. For that reason, the segmenter in question could be of particular interest for cultural institutions, that want access to robust line bounding boxes for a given historic document. Because of the promising segmentation results that are joined by low computational cost, the algorithm was incorporated into the OCR pipeline of the National Library of Luxembourg, in the context of the initiative of reprocessing their historic newspaper collection. The general contribution of this paper is to outline the approach and to evaluate the gains in terms of accuracy and speed, comparing it to the segmentation algorithm bundled with the used open source OCR software.

Printed Texts Tracking and Following for a Finger-Wearable Electro-Braille System Through Opto-electrotactile Feedback

This paper presents our recent development on a portable and refreshable text reading and sensory substitution system for the blind or visually impaired (BVI), called Finger-eye. The system mainly consists of an opto-text processing unit and a compact electro-tactile based display that can deliver text-related electrical signals to the fingertip skin through a wearable and Braille-dot patterned electrode array and thus delivers the electro-stimulation based Braille touch sensations to the fingertip. To achieve the goal of aiding BVI to read any text not written in Braille through this portable system, in this work, a Rapid Optical Character Recognition (R-OCR) method is firstly developed for real-time processing text information based on a Fisheye imaging device mounted at the finger-wearable electro-tactile display. This allows real-time translation of printed text to electro-Braille along with natural movement of user's fingertip as if reading any Braille display or book. More importantly, an electro-tactile neuro-stimulation feedback mechanism is proposed and incorporated with the R-OCR method, which facilitates a new opto-electrotactile feedback based text line tracking control approach that enables text line following by user fingertip during reading. Multiple experiments were designed and conducted to test the ability of blindfolded participants to read through and follow the text line based on the opto-electrotactile-feedback method. The experiments show that as the result of the opto-electrotactile-feedback, the users were able to maintain their fingertip within a 2mm distance of the text while scanning a text line. This research is a significant step to aid the BVI users with a portable means to translate and follow to read any printed text to Braille, whether in the digital realm or physically, on any surface.